the victim of a "plot" by his own friends and supporters, the very
gentlemen (sic) who furnished him with free special trains, paid his
campaign expenses and in fact bought the presidency for him, is so
palpably false as to be absolutely ridiculous and only brings into
bolder relief the hypocrisy and fraud it was designed to conceal.
This much is preliminary to the extraordinary official conduct of the
president which has "horrified" not only its victims but millions of
others, and now prompts this review and protest.
Something over a year ago Charles Moyer, William Haywood and George
Pettibone, of Colorado, leading officials of the Western Federation of
Miners, were overpowered and kidnaped by a gang of thugs and torn from
their families at night by conspiracy of two degenerate governors and
another notorious criminal acting for the Mine and Smelter Trust, one of
the most stupendous aggregations of force and plunder in all America.
Every decent man and woman was "horrified" by this infamy and the whole
working class of the nation cried out against it.
Was Roosevelt also "horrified"?
Yes!
Because the Mine and Smelter Trust had kidnaped three citizens of the
republic?
Oh, no!
The three citizens were only working cattle and he never had any other
conception of them.
He was "horrified" because the Mine and Smelter Trust, unclean birds
that feather their nests, especially in Colorado, with legislatures and
United States senatorships, had not killed instead of kidnaping their
victims.
Then and there Theodore Roosevelt disgraced himself and his high office,
and his cruel and cowardly act will load his name with odium as long as
it is remembered.
The Mine and Smelter Trust had put up the funds and used its vast
machinery for Roosevelt, and now Roosevelt must serve it even to the
extent of upholding criminals, approving kidnaping and murdering its
helpless victims.
When Roosevelt stepped out of the White House and called Moyer, Haywood
and Pettibone _murderers_, men he had never seen and did not know; men
who had never been tried, never convicted and whom every law of the land
presumed innocent until proven guilty, he fell a million miles beneath
where Lincoln stood, and there he grovels today with his political
crimes, one after another, finding him out and pointing at him their
accusing fingers.
No president of the United States has ever descended to such depths as
has Roosevelt to serve his law-defying and crime-inciting masters.
The act is simply scandalous and without a parallel in American history.
What right has Theodore Roosevelt to prejudge American citizens,
pronounce their guilt and hand them over to the hangman? In a
pettifogging lawyer such an act would be infamous; in the president of
the nation it becomes monstrous and staggers belief.
All that Roosevelt knows about Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone he knows
from his friends, their kidnapers.
The millions of working men and women, embracing practically every labor
union in America, count for nothing with him. He is not now standing for
their votes. He is fulfilling his obligation to the gentlemen (!) who
put up the coin that elected him; paying off the mortgage they hold upon
his administration.
Theodore Roosevelt is swift to brand other men who even venture to
disagree with him as liars. He, according to himself, is immaculate and
infallible.
The greatest liar is he who sees only liars in others.
_When Theodore Roosevelt, president of the United States, denounced
Charles Moyer, William Haywood and George Pettibone as murderers, he
uttered a lie as black and damnable, a calumny as foul and atrocious as
ever issued from a human throat. The men he thus traduced and vilified,
sitting in their prison cells for having dutifully served their
fellow-workers and having spurned the bribes of their masters, transcend
immeasurably the man in the White House, who, with the cruel malevolence
of a barbarian, has pronounced their doom._
A thousand times rather would I be one of those men in Ada county jail
than Theodore Roosevelt in the White House at Washington.
Had these men accepted, with but a shadow of the eagerness Roosevelt
displayed, the debauching funds of the trust pirates, they would not now
languish in felons' cells.
The same brazen robbers of the people and corrupters of the body politic
who put Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone in jail, also put Theodore
Roosevelt in the White House.
This accounts for his prostituting the high office Lincoln honored and
resorting to methods that would shame a Bowery ward-heeler.
Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone are not murderers; it is a ghastly lie, and
I denounce it in the name of law and in the name of justice. I know
these men, these sons of toil; I know their hearts, their guileless
nature and their rugged honesty. I love and honor them and shall fight
for them while there is breath in my body.
Here and now I challenge Theodore Roosevelt. He is guilty of high crimes
and deserves impeachment.
Let him do his worst. I denounce him and defy him.
During my recent visit at Washington I learned from those who know him
what they think of Roosevelt. Among newspaper men he is literally
despised. Their true feeling is not apparent in what they write, for
they know that the slightest offense to the president is _lese majeste_
and means instantaneous decapitation.
For the second time, Theodore Roosevelt, president of the United States,
has now publicly convicted Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone. He has not
pronounced condemnation upon Harry Thaw, or any rich man charged with
murder. He has, however, made a postmaster of a man at Chicago charged
by the Chicago _Tribune_ with having shot another man in a midnight
brawl over disreputable women, and then used his influence to make the
same man mayor of that city.
Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone, the three workingmen kidnaped by the Mine
and Smelter Trust, have now been in jail fourteen months; they have not
been tried, but twice condemned by President Roosevelt, the last time
but a few days ago, in connection with Harriman, his former political
pal and financial backer. These men are in prison cells, their bodies in
manacles and their lips sealed. They cannot speak for themselves. They
are voiceless and at the mercy of calumny. No matter how grossly
outraged, they must submit.
For a man clothed with the almost absolute power of a president to
strike down men gagged and bound, as these men are, he must have an
unspeakably brutal and cowardly nature, just such a nature as the
governor of an empire state must have to turn a deaf ear to the
agonizing entreaties of a shrieking, shuddering woman and see her
dragged into the horrors of electrocution.
The true character of this man is being gradually revealed to the
American people. He has never been anything but an enemy of the working
class. He joined a labor organization purely as a demagogue. In all his
life he never associated with working people. His writings, before he
became a politician, show that he held them in contempt. When he entered
political life he soon learned how to shake hands with a fireman for the
camera and have his press agent do the rest, and it was this species of
demagoguery, the very basest conceivable, that idolized him with the
ignorant mass and gave him the votes of the millions he in his heart
despised as an inferior race.
In his book on "Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail," page 10, written long
before he entered politics, Roosevelt reveals his innate contempt for
those who toil. After describing cowboys when "drunk on the villainous
whiskey of the frontier towns," he closes with this comparison, which
needs no comment: "They are much better fellows and pleasanter
companions than small farmers or agricultural laborers; nor are the
mechanics and workmen of a great city to be mentioned in the same
breath."
The pretended friendship for the great body of workingmen who are not to
be compared to drunken cowboys has served its demagogical purpose, but
the final chapter is not yet written. There will be an awakening, and
every official act of Theodore Roosevelt will be subjected to its
searching scrutiny. He has always been on the side of capital wholly,
while pretending the impossible feat of serving both capital and labor
with equal fidelity, and only the deplorable ignorance of his dupes has
applauded him in that hypocritical role.
The anthracite miners, or their children at least, will some day know
that it was President Theodore Roosevelt who handed them over to the
coal trust with a gold brick for a souvenir, labeled "Arbitration."
Theodore Roosevelt is an aristocrat and an autocrat. His affected
democracy is spurious and easily detected. He belongs to the "upper
crust" and at the very best he can conceive of the working class only as
contented wage-slaves. And no one knows better than he how easily these
slaves are duped and how madly they will cheer and follow a cheap and
showy "hero."
The simple fact is that Theodore Roosevelt was made president by the
industrial captains and the robbers in general of the working class.
They picked him for a winner and he has not failed them. Elected by the
trusts and surrounded by trust attorneys as cabinet advisers, Roosevelt
is essentially the monarch of a trust administration.
If this be denied, Roosevelt is challenged to answer if it was not the
railroad trust that furnished him gratuitously with the special trains
that bore him in royal splendor over all the railways of the nation. He
is challenged to publish the list of contributors to his political
sewer funds, amounting to millions of dollars, and freely used to buy
the votes that made him president.
Did, or did not, the men known as trust magnates put up this boodle?
Boodle drawn from the veins of labor?
Will Mr. Roosevelt deny it?
Did he not know at the time that his man Cortelyou was holding up the
trusts for all they would "cough up" for his election?
Will he dare plead ignorance to intelligent persons as to who put up the
money that debauched the voters of the nation?
It is true that a spasm of virtuous indignation seized him when he found
that the trusts had slipped the lucre into his slush funds when he was
not looking, but this was only after he saw the people looking behind
the curtain. Then he bounded to the foot-lights and denounced Alton B.
Parker as a liar for charging that the trusts were furnishing the boodle
to make him president, but no man not feeble-minded was deceived as to
who was the liar.
Read the Washington press dispatch in the Kansas City _Journal_ of April
4th: "It was declared in banking circles that light could be shed on the
question of campaign contributions in 1904 if the books of the national
Republican committee were thrown open."
The books will not be thrown open. Roosevelt will not allow it; he knows
they contain the damning evidence of his guilt.
The case is clearly stated in the platform of the Democratic state
convention of Missouri, adopted in 1906, which reads as follows:
"We believe Theodore Roosevelt insincere. Pretending to inveigh against
the crimes of trusts and corporations, he openly defended Paul Morton,
when, as manager of the Santa Fe railroad, he was compelled to confess
enormous rebates to the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. It was Roosevelt
who advanced the pernicious doctrine that you must punish the
corporation, not its officials who cause it to commit crime. It was
Roosevelt who denounced large campaign contributions, while his
secretary of commerce and labor was fleecing the corporations out of
_one of the biggest slush funds ever known in the history of American
politics_."
President Roosevelt may shout "liar" until he turns as black in the face
as are the cracksmen at heart who burglarized the safes of the New York
insurance companies to land him in the White House, while he was toying
with the names of "Jimmy" Hyde and Chauncey Depew as pawns in the
corrupt game, but the "damned spot" will not out until the whole truth
is known and the whole crime expiated.
The publication of the Roosevelt-Harriman correspondence places the
president in his true colors before the American people. It explains his
hot haste in condemning Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone to the gallows and
sending Taft to Idaho to assure the smelter trust and warn the
protesting people that the kidnaping of the workingmen was sanctioned
by the White House and would have the support of the national
administration.
A more shameful perversion of public power never blackened the pages of
history.
This national scandal shows up the president's two-faced character so
clearly and convincingly that it leaves not so much as a pin-hole for
escape. It is a damning indictment of not only the president, but the
whole brood of plutocrats, promoters and grafting politicians who have
been looting this nation for years.
There is one among these illuminating epistles which I want to burn in
the minds of the working class dupes who have been bowing in the dust
before this blustering bully of the White House:
"Personal.
"October 1, 1904.--My Dear Mr. Harriman: A suggestion has come to me in
a round-about way that you do not think it wise to come to see me in
these closing weeks of the campaign, but that you are reluctant to
refuse, inasmuch as I have asked you. Now, my dear sir, you and I are
practical men, and you are on the ground and know the conditions better
than I do.
"If you think there is any danger of your visit to me causing trouble,
or if you think there is nothing special I should be informed about, or
any matter in which I could give aid, why, of course, give up the visit
for the time being, and then, a few weeks hence, before I write my
message, I shall get you to come down to discuss certain government
matters not connected with the campaign. With great regards, sincerely
yours,
(Signed) "THEODORE ROOSEVELT."
Does not this brand the president with the duplicity of a Tweed and the
cunning of a Quay?
Would a president who is honest with the people clandestinely consort
with the villain he characterizes as a liar and all that is vicious?
The disclosures made in the secret correspondence strip the president of
the last shred of deception with which to cloak his perfidy. The mask is
lifted and the exposure is complete. It is in the president's own
handwriting in a letter to Harriman that would never have seen the light
had not circumstances forced it upon the attention of a betrayed people.
It is adroitly phrased, but its meaning is not in doubt. He knew
Harriman then as he knows him now; wanted his boodle and insinuatingly
coaxed him to sneak to the White House when no one was looking, and only
after he was discovered did he denounce Harriman as a liar and fall into
his usual fit of moral epilepsy.
From now on there will be a sharp decline in the stock of Theodore
Roosevelt. The capitalist papers may continue to boom him as the only
savior and his corps of press agents at the White House may continue to
grind out three-column stories about the awful conspiracy of his
"trusty" friends to ruin him, but his bubble is pricked and the cheap
glory in which he reveled is departing forever.
The people have been sadly deceived for a time, but the march of events
is opening their eyes.
Only the very ignorant and foolish believe that a president who has
surrounded himself with Wall Street darlings as cabinet ministers has
any serious designs on the trusts.
The Ryan, Root and Roosevelt combination is ideal. It speaks for itself,
and with such shining lights as Taft, Cortelyou, Knox and Paul Morton
surrounding it, all lingering doubt is removed, and the fools' paradise
is in the full blaze of its glory.
Space will not permit a review of the personnel of the president's
official family, at least two of whom, had the law been enforced, would
now be in penitentiary.
The story of President Roosevelt and Paul Morton, if truthfully told,
would make a luminous chapter in railroad rascality and political
jobbery. It was to this notorious strike-breaker and self-confessed
criminal that Roosevelt issued a bill of moral rectitude long as Pope's
essay that landed him into the eighty-thousand-dollars-a-year insurance
graft he now holds down.
There is in this "promotion" the very climax of the irony of boodle.
Paul Morton, who began as a strike-breaker on the C. B. & Q., and reared
a monument to theft at Hutchinson, Kan., and left his trail of crime all
the way from the Mississippi to the Pacific, is fit, indeed, to be the
cabinet associate and confidential chum of a president who puts him at
the head of the company whose funds were stolen to buy his election.
William H. Taft is another of the elect, and it is easy to understand
why Roosevelt has decided to make this illustrious son his successor as
president of the United States and is now grooming him with the
patronage of the national administration. Taft is a man after
Roosevelt's own heart. Among his early acts as a judge he fined the
bricklayers of Cincinnati two thousand dollars for going on a strike; he
was next whirled to Toledo by special train and ordered by the Toledo,
Ann Arbor and North Michigan railroad to issue an injunction binding and
gagging its striking engineers and firemen and locking their leader up
in jail and he complied with alacrity. From that time on it has been
smooth sailing for the accommodating judge and there is not a bloated
plutocrat in the land who would not hail with joy the election of
William Taft as president; he would be almost as acceptable to these
vultures as Roosevelt himself.
The manner in which President Roosevelt manipulates the supreme court by
bestowing lucrative offices upon the sons and other relatives and
friends of its dignitaries can only be hinted at here, but will receive
due attention later on. The case of ex-Senator Burton is an instance in
point. Other senators had taken thousands in similar cases to Burton's
paltry few hundred dollars, but Burton was marked by Roosevelt for
refusing to crook the knee to the sugar trust and pursued with merciless
ferocity until he was lodged behind prison bars.
The president did not have a call to "go after" his old friends,
Chauncey Depew and Thomas Platt, with the same virtuous passion to see
crime punished and criminals jailed.
When Roosevelt was making his continental campaign in the palatial
special trains furnished free by the railroad trust he stopped at
Abilene, Kan., the home of the then Senator Burton, and opened his
speech there in these words: "I am glad to be at the home of the senior
senator from Kansas and am delighted to meet and greet his neighbors and
friends. I want to say that no man in this world has done more, and I
had almost said, as much, to place me where I am now, than your
distinguished senator."
Fine way the president had of showing his gratitude. Burton should have
known better and taken warning. Whenever Roosevelt gets that near to a
man something is going to happen. "My dear" is then due to be
metamorphosed with startling suddenness into an "atrocious liar."
Roosevelt can brook no rivalry. He is the self-appointed central
luminary in the solar system. All others must be contented with being
fire-flies. He must violate all traditions and smash all precedents. He
is spectacular beyond the wildest dreams. He must have the center of the
stage and hold the undivided attention of the audience. Any stunt will
do when the interest lags. A familiar turn with a prize-fighter or a
"gun-man" is always good for an encore. Nothing is overlooked. A dash to
Panama with a fleet of battle-ships and a battery of cameras and a squad
of artists and reporters is good for thousands of columns about the
marvelous virility and fertility of the greatest president since
Washington. He is followed with minute and eager details as he darts
from cellar to roof, inspects every shingle, wears a solemn expression,
throws a shovelful of coal into the furnace, snatches a bite from a
workingman's pail, shakes hands with a startled section man and is off
like a flash to look after some other section of the planet that it may
not drop out of its shining orbit.
Mighty savior of the human race!
Such is Theodore Roosevelt, the president who condemns workingmen as
murderers when they are objectionable to the trusts that control his
administration.
Archbishop Ireland, the plutocratic prelate, will cheerfully certify to
Roosevelt as the anointed of the Lord. And this will make another
interesting chapter for a later review; a chapter that will deal with
Ireland as the political as well as spiritual adviser of "Jim" Hill and
the Great Northern, and of court decisions awarding him thousands of
acres of land and making of the alleged follower of the Tramp of Galilee
a multi-millionaire; a chapter that will tell of a high priest sounding
the political keynote to his benighted followers in exchange for a
promised voucher for a red hat to be worn in a land of freedom in which
the state and church are absolutely divorced.
Only a few of the facts about Roosevelt and his regime have been here
stated, but enough to satisfy all honest men that _Theodore Roosevelt is
the Friend of the Enemies and the Enemy of the Friends of this
Republic_.
INDUSTRIAL AND SOCIAL DEMOCRACY.
American Socialist, May 27, 1915.
First of all, allow me to quote with approval the following paragraph
from "An Introduction to Sociology" by Arthur Morrow Lewis: " * * * the
greatest single achievement of the science of sociology is the concept
of society, not as a collection of institutions, and sociology as an
explanatory catalog or inventory--after the fashion of Spencer, but as a
process of development, and the science of sociology as the analysis and
explanation of the process."
Also the following from an essay on Revolution by George D. Herron:
"Every revolution or true reform, every new and commanding faith, is in
the direction of man's becoming his own evolver and creator. Every
uplifting light or law perforces, in the place of the evolution that is
blind and chanceful, an evolution that is chosen and humanly directed."
There is still room for reform and betterment in the present social
system, but this is of minor consequence compared to the world's crying
need for industrial and social reorganization.
* * * * *
The next great change in history will be, must be, the socialization of
the means of our common life.
Privately owned industry and production for individual profit are no
longer compatible with social progress and have ceased to work out to
humane and civilized ends.
With all its marvelous progress through invention and discovery and all
its monumental achievements in the arts and sciences, this poor world of
ours has not yet learned how to feed itself. That is the problem of
problems now confronting us more and more insistently and until that is
solved the world is halted and it will either resume its march toward
industrial and social democracy or be shaken to its foundations and into
possible chaos by violent explosion.
There is no longer the shadow of an excuse for a hungry being. All the
laws, all the materials and all the forces are at hand and easily
available for the production of all things needed to provide food,
raiment and shelter for every man, woman and child, thus putting an end
to the poverty and misery, widespread and appalling, which now shock and
sicken humanity and impeach our vaunted civilization. But these tools
and materials and forces must be released from private ownership and
control, socialized, democratized, and set in operation for the common
good of all instead of the private profit of the few.
* * * * *
It is well stated, "that civilization is at present rudimentary, and
that it is to develop indefinitely."